Business and management

Social media

"Amen” or “hell no”

“ONCE a plan gets too complex, everything can go wrong,” says Walter Sobchack, a character in the comedy movie The Big Lebowski. This could also be the motto of Amen, an internet start-up based in Berlin. It has translated the idea of social media into a service even simpler than Twitter: instead of posting what is on their mind, users just say what they like, as in "Murphy’s is the best place for a Guinness in Berlin-Mitte“ or “Loving someone who loves you back is the best feeling ever”. And fellow users only have two options to comment: “Amen” or “Hell No”.

This may sound simplistic, but the thinking behind Amen is anything but. What at first glance seems a strange game for extroverts to trumpet their preferences is in fact an intriguing way to come up with rankings of all sorts. If enough people post what they like and enough use the service’s good-or-bad voting system, Amen’s algorithms can put together relevant charts on everything its fans are interested in: steak-restaurants in the centre of Paris, the best mountain bikes for less than €1,000, all kinds of movie categories. According to the Amen community, The Big Lebowski is by far the best movie for quotes ever (114 amen).

People love rankings—because they think these allow them to make better choices. Small wonder that Amen caused a stir in the tech press and elsewhere when it launched in summer 2011. It attracted prominent investors, including Ashton Kutcher, an American actor, and Index Ventures, one of Europe’s leading VC firms. Enthusiasts were amazed how “strangely addictive” it is to use the firm’s smartphone app. Others, however, considered Amen to be a huge waste of time—and doomed to fail.

Nearly two years on, the jury is still out. Felix Petersen, one of the founders and Amen’s boss, is not much help to gauge the success of the service. “More than 3,5m posts” is the only number he is willing to reveal. Number of registered users? Daily activity? Growth rates? As most digital start-ups, the firm does not publish such statistics. The service does not seem a huge success, according to independent sources, such as AppData: it ranks the Amen app 154th in its chart of the most popular apps in Germany for the iPhone (the only platform for which Amen is available).

Yet Amen can be very useful, for instance if one happens to look for a good bar somewhere in Berlin central district. Instead of trying to laboriously elicit an answer from Google or another search engine on their smartphone, users can get Amen to quickly serve up a list of places to go. And if its app knows where a user is, the service highlights the watering holes in walking distance. “Amen was always meant to be a search engine based on social data,” explains Mr Petersen.

When it comes to making money, Amen’s plan is to mix the revenue models of Google and Twitter. At some point the firm intends to introduce advertising within its rankings—and may even allow users to vote on the companies that are paying their way into the charts. That could be a clever way to make advertising relevant for users. If the statement “Xyz has the best falafel ever” is not true, it will attract many a “hell no” and quickly disappear from the top of the list. Whether many advertisers will take the risk is another matter.

Readers' comments

Please, what is the reason to publish an article about a geographically limited, semi-successful online start-up that's already some years old? Especially, "if one happens to look for a good bar somewhere" then one can find that easily with existing (and I guess bigger and more successful) services such as Yelp or Qype. Social rating websites are older than the one discussed above. This was probably the most pointless article I read on The Economist for years, sorry.

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